With the Traveling Geeks @ Pearltrees

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 - 2 commentaires -

 

   

The Tra­ve­ling Geeks met with Patrice Lamothe from Pearl­trees (@pearltrees) for nearly two hours at the begin­ning of the Tra­ve­ling Geeks tour.

This guy is run­ning the Inter­net star­tup buzz play­book like per­fect, at least for a French star­tup: he did a tour in the Sili­con Val­ley visi­ting local influen­cers and blog­gers, spon­so­red the Tra­ve­ling Geeks and Leweb, tal­king at Leweb in ple­nary ses­sion (twice…), crea­ting plug-ins, but­tons, that can be pla­ced eve­ryw­here on social sites, his site is in English, and so on. As a result, he got heck of a good visi­bi­lity. And we were very kindly wel­co­med in the com­pany which looks like an US star­tup: lots of cof­fee and… US sized patisserie.

The com­pany rai­sed $3m of fun­ding (2m€) out of busi­ness angels and family offices. Patrice, though, is not dis­clo­sing the sources of his fun­ding. Too bad.

So, Pearl­tree wants to “curate the web” on a gra­phi­cal basis. It enables its users to connect sites, people, ideas in 2D dyna­mic maps that you can browse in and out. (Some) people like to do this, like those using book­mar­king ser­vices like Del-ici-ous. With Pearl­trees, you can get in touch with people by inter­est, pick their pre­fer­red content and connect it with yours. Kind of a visually enri­ched and col­la­bo­ra­tive based tag­ging sys­tem. The tool can import data from deli­cious and export it in the seman­tic web RDF for­mat. It can be used in such seman­tic web ser­vices as Twine and Open­Ca­lais. While the com­pany has not yet any patents or IP, its soft­ware is using very com­plex algo­rithms and mathe­ma­tics to manage the gra­phi­cal tool.

The site was laun­ched in beta form at Leweb. Patrice Lamothe came twice on stage, first to present his concept and second, after­wards, to present a Leweb pearl­tree to illus­trate the concept. It has lots of women users, in the US and France. It got from zero to 3K US users in just two weeks thanks to blog ori­gi­na­ted buzz. But all star­tups start like this. What about cros­sing the chasm afterwards?

I’m rather skep­tic of the out­look for such a tool. There have been so many unsuc­cess­full tries to create visual tools to orga­nize infor­ma­tion, pro­vide search engines results and so on. Will this kind of solu­tion scale well when as infor­ma­tion gets com­plex? Text hand­ling usually works bet­ter like with search engines. I don’t think the mass of users will switch from text based search to this sort of tool to find information.

So, like many such ser­vices, it may not appeal to the broad Inter­net users audience by may be use­ful for some elite users (French example here), maybe in some spe­ci­fic busi­ness situa­tions such as in techno-screening, opi­nion assess­ments, mar­ke­ting and PR. Such a solu­tion should be a fix to some clearly iden­ti­fied pro­blem. Not just nice and fancy visua­li­za­tion and navigation.

Also, the foun­der said he will think later about buil­ding a busi­ness model. While it some­times works, like in the case of Google, it’s also why many star­tups fail and close. So, watch-out Patrice, and start to seriously think about your busi­ness model and link it with spe­ci­fic cus­to­mer seg­ments and pain points.

Publié le 13 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Internet, Marketing, Post in English, Startups, Traveling Geeks | 10533 lectures